RobbieThe1st wrote:
You should get/use Firefox, as you most likely already know, or, actually, anything other than IE is fine by me.
Meh, *shrugs* I prefer IE7, and have since it was beta (in certain ways, I actually preferred the beta). That's why I use it when I'm at home. The developer support in Firefox (read "Firebug") is several orders of magnitude in superiority, so that's what I use at work. Besides, it's generally trickier to get pages to work right in Firefox, so if I develop for it first, it's usually just minor tweaks to make it all work properly under IE. This is all beside the point, though...
RobbieThe1st wrote:
Now, while this is most likely not true, one theory would be that the Basitin race were actually Keidran(or Keidran/Human, before the masks forbade it), and thats why they live on the island - they got kicked from the mainland. This would also account for the completely unique appearance, and their own unique traits, like resistance to poison for instance, as, after a while, traits such as that would end up appearing, due to the fact that Basitin without said trait wouldn't do well, or would simply die off(and the 60-year lifespan could be a mix of human/Keidran genes).
On that note, you could also surmise that the third mask came in later or simply waited, and then took over control of the mixed race, which then became Basitin.
Well, without knowledge of the actual creation myths of the races, it's hard to say. One
could consider that all three races are descended from a common ancestor. *shrug* Perhaps the Keidran are an offshoot of early Basitins that came to colonize the mainland and lost their resistances because they were no longer biologically pressured to maintain them. :P
Personally, I think that the physiological differences between the races argue against any of them being directly descended from any of the others. Since we've got demi-gods and magic, there's really no reason to hold up some sort of evolutionary process as their origin -- it's as likely that they were formed wholesale and complete from nothingness as they arrived in their present forms by minor mutations across a near infinity of time. I'd considered that each Mask had made a race of mortals and, to some extent at least, shepherded them, but Tom's discussion of the Masks recently puts that in doubt. Since no Mask truly lords over any specific race of mortals, but instead plays them all to their advantage whenever they're able, I must now hesitate before linking a Mask too strongly to the race.
Personally, I'm most curious as to what a Basitin/Keidran hybrid is like. All we know is that they're biologically feasible; simply extraordinarily rare, I suspect largely due to Basitin mores. This same wondering gets applied to Human/Keidran hybrids, but since the first natural one of those in many, many years is still to come, it's less pressing on my curiosity (especially since we know we'll see that one). How do disparate races combine genetically? Do we see an averaging of lifespans and maturities? Do their immune systems inherit from one side or the other, or hybridize? Would one have the "addiction" to following orders that the Basitins have, or the more freewheeling mind of most Keidran? (That's not a question that children of Keith and Natani would answer very well...Both the Basitin race and the Keidran Wolf morph would have a strongly inbred tendency to obey authority.) Since the differences in appearance between Keidran and Basitin are relatively minor, considering a crossbreed between those races allows us to focus further on biochemistry rather than morphology (for instance, the thread on Trace and Flora's presupposed children concentrated largely on what they'd look like).
And also, I once again ask, why does the forum believe that all of the Keidran we've seen are carnivorous? Are there no true omnivores or herbivores among the Keidran? If so, why?